I can’t believe
that kid that was harming themselves
would end up sitting here. I’ve come so far.
For the first time, I’m seeing that
there’s an abundance of opportunity.
I wish I wouldn’t have blamed myself so much
for the way I felt and for the self-harm,
because that’s made it harder.
All I actually needed to do was to be brave enough
to step out of myself.
Self-harm behaviours are warning signs
that something is not right.
There’s great optimism
for people making
a recovery that’s good and that lasts.
I first sort of started to self-harm
when I was about 16.
It was a lack of confidence
and sort of feeling like I didn’t fit in anywhere,
and I just had all this frustration about
my identity, who I was.
My mum was just worried about me constantly.
I was not really talking to anyone about it,
just assuming this was normal and everyone felt like that.
I experienced self-harm
related to my anger especially.
From a young age I kind of learned that anger was
a scary thing or a thing that I shouldn’t allow myself to feel.
I experienced trauma that I blacked out,
that I couldn’t access for years.
I didn’t really know what I was doing
or have a plan, or purpose, even.
But I was getting desperate.
Self-harm is a behaviour,
and it’s a form of communication.
Self-harm expresses emotional pain
through a transformation into physical pain.
There are a few statistics
in relation to self-harm.
One in six children and young people aged 16 years
in England had a problem with mental illness in 2021.
That would translate to something like
five children in every classroom of 30.
You can self-harm in multiple ways.
It doesn’t always have to be
through the standard ways that we know.
Self-harming relationships,
substance misuse – so there’s a variety of
different ways in which people do it.
I self-harmed on and off with cutting,
then I developed an eating disorder.
I just became very secretive
and then it sort of turned into more neglecting myself.
I’d been out drinking and I just didn’t stop.
I noticed that a lot of my anger
was directed at myself,
whether it was like pinching myself
or biting the inside of my cheek, things like that.
A lot of my bingeing would happen when I was angry
or upset and didn’t feel like I was being listened to.
In the very traditional gender-based ways,
often males will tend to self-harm
in quite violent ways, so getting into a fight,
sometimes, or they put their fist through a glass.
We’re learning a lot more about
the experience of trauma.
There’s a kind of capital-T trauma,
but there’s also small-T trauma.
All those small wounds that we all have
from adverse life experiences
where perhaps we felt we haven’t been seen or known.
So it’s not that something happened –
maybe something didn’t happen.
People know that it’s hard being a teenager.
It just wasn’t that.
My parents wanted to help, but they didn’t know how,
so I hid it better. I didn’t want to ask for help
because I didn’t want to seem like I was attention-seeking,
or belittled, or made fun of.
You want to be seen,
but you don’t want attention for the self-harm.
When people say that self-harm
is attention-seeking is to see it as attention-needing.
Because self-harm is a form of communication,
in order to move forward,
you need to find an alternative form of communication,
convert it into any other outward form of communication
rather than making it implode,
making the pain implode back on you.
Something I’m doing to work towards
living a better life is therapy.
I still withhold a lot of myself from other people,
but I definitely get to talk to myself
through the art that I do.
My anger is a wave that can come and go.
Being angry doesn’t make me an angry person.
I got a journal out and just started writing.
I tend to share a lot of my poetry
or anything I’ve written with my mum.
Through running my Instagram account
and working in the mental health industry, I think
it’s shown how much helping other people has helped myself.
Walking is a great tool for me.
Walking allows me to process things in my mind.
I do lots of different things.
I’ve had to plan my life in a way that
I feel good and I don’t relapse.
It’s important to get your feelings out in whatever way.
Creative projects are really good in order to
learn how to verbalise things and understand what’s going on.
Coming together with a group of people
that were like myself, sharing words
and experiences, feels really comforting.
Expressing myself in a creative way
using my own words
I never thought would be possible for someone like me.
One thing I’ve learnt over the last year or so
is that it just takes a few moments of bravery
to get the support that you need.
You don’t need to feel that you deserve it,
you just need to know you need it.
It’s not always going to be perfect,
but just do your best.
No matter what you do,
people are there to support you.
We definitely need to be open for people to
tell us what they need.
Society just needs to be
a lot more person-centred and trauma-informed.
Being trauma-aware,
we have responsibility
with the young people to relate to them where they are.
Having some compassion that somebody may have
experienced some trauma is helpful.
It’s really important to see this
as a period of time in your life which you marked
as being distressing,
and to be able to see that as a phase that you have now
moved from, and to be proud of having got through it.
You can do it.
I thought that was it.
Whatever I was feeling, wherever I was then
was going to be forever.
And it wasn’t.
It hasn’t been easy every step of the way,
growing up, or as an adult, but it is not the same.
Things change, and they get better, and, er…
…come and go.
